Assignment:
Social Influence and Forgetting
What are your thoughts on the content of this discussion below as it relates to cultural and social influence? Do you agree or disagree?
Why
This person will discuss the role of cultural and social influence on two of the following: eyewitness testimony, memory distortion, source memory, or recovered memories. In addition this person will discuss why is it sometimes important to forget what has been learned.
This is their discussion:
Eyewitness testimony is a legal term. It refers to an account given by people of an event they have witnessed. For example they may be required to give a description at a trail of a robbery or a road accident someone has seen. This includes identification of perpetrators, details of the crime scene etc. Eyewitness testimony is an important area of research in cognitive psychology and human memory. Jury tend to pay close attention to eyewitness testimony and generally find it a reliable source of information.
While the study of cultural influences in memory is in its infancy, particularly in terms of neural measures, initial studies provide strong evidence that attentional, emotional, and object-based processes differ across cultural groups. A fine line distinguishes the domain of memory from these related processes. For example, memory formation and retrieval depend critically on attention to features of information during encoding and the relevant cues during retrieval. Furthermore, cultural preferences for object versus context, individual versus group-based information, or different emotional states will certainly influence the aspects of experiences that are incorporated into memories, and the component sub processes used to store and retrieve these memories.
Sometimes, we may actively work to forget memories, especially those of traumatic or disturbing events or experiences. The two basic forms of motivated forgetting are: suppression, a conscious form of forgetting, and repression, an unconscious form of forgetting. However, the concept of repressed memories is not universally accepted by all psychologists. One of the problems with repressed memories is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to scientifically study whether or not a memory has been repressed. Also note that mental activities such as rehearsal and remembering are important ways of strengthening a memory, and memories of painful or traumatic life events are far less likely to be remembered, discussed or rehearsed.